


over all of the hills

by voksen



Category: Les Misérables - Victor Hugo
Genre: Gen, Missing Scene
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-10-28
Updated: 2013-10-28
Packaged: 2017-12-30 18:46:17
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,195
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1022139
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/voksen/pseuds/voksen
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Mgr. Myriel wakes early to find his brother praying on his doorstep.</p>
            </blockquote>





	over all of the hills

**Author's Note:**

  * For [StripySock](https://archiveofourown.org/users/StripySock/gifts).



"Come in," said the Bishop.

It was the third time Jean Valjean had heard those words in that calm, kind voice, and yet at hearing them he shuddered beneath their weight. When he looked up at the opened door - for he had been kneeling on the doorstep, attempting to recall some prayer or another through the dreadful haze that had only just lifted from his mind - it seemed to him that he looked almost up to Heaven. "M--," he said, his voice catching in his dry throat and rasping into silence. He swallowed thickly and tried again: "Monseigneur," he said. "I have-- I am--" and again his voice failed him; he felt as if he might choke on a nothing that felt as large as an apple; he felt glued to the earth by the weight of the coin in his pocket, heavier than a hundred caryatids.

The Bishop held up his candle - Valjean saw with an ill-repressed shudder that the candlestick that held it was dull pewter - and looked down into his face in the soft light. "You are welcome here," he said gently, touched Valjean's shoulder less in blessing than in brotherhood, and stepped back into the house.

Valjean struggled to his feet; he had been kneeling for some hours and his feet had gone numb from the unaccustomed position, though that bothered him less than the words he had not been able to say. He followed the Bishop inside and laid cudgel and pack in the corner where they had been only the night before; then, hands freed, clasped them together.

"It is late - or early," the Bishop said as he closed the door against the chill. "The cot is not ready; but if you would not object to--"

"I am a thief," Valjean said abruptly, his thoughts - lifted by contemplation, jumbled by confusion - finally halting enough to let him speak, and in confessing it felt the ache of a reset bone and the loosening of the guilt that gripped his throat. "But Monseigneur -- I do not want to be. What you said to me before, that I should become honest, that I belonged to good; to God; I want to be that man you spoke of. I do not know how to be that man; for nineteen years they have taught me to be a thief. I learned to read, I told you that; I read you my passport, where it says I am a dangerous man and must go to Pontarlier. I can write. I meant to use that against them. Now I don't want to. It seems to me that could be used for good. But I don't know how; no one has ever taught me. I want to learn it."

Monseigneur Bienvenu had listened to this speech in silence with an expression of mild astonishment, but when Valjean had finished he smiled. "And I am glad to hear it," he said, "for in thinking of how you might do good and spread peace with the things you know, you have already begun. But this house is still open to you; you do not need to leave unrested in the night, nor until you are ready. All that is here is yours: I am quite awake; you might rest in my bed until morning."

"I could not sleep," said Valjean, who remembered very well the almost unbearable comfort of the cot - the soft mattress which had woken him in the dead of night and lit temptation. To steal again was unthinkable - and yet the idea shook him.

"You might rest without sleeping; or meditate with me."

"I do not know how." In truth Valjean did not know the meaning of the word, having had little occasion to have heard it before.

"I think you do," said the Bishop.

This was to Valjean a mystery along the lines of the promise he still could not remember making: the promise which he had come to embrace with all of the first tentative outstretchings of his soul. If the Bishop said he did, then he must; and so he followed without further protest as Monseigneur Bienvenu led the way through his bedroom and into the oratory. The alcove where Valjean had spent the terrible night before was empty, the cot tucked away and unmade - but the Bishop stopped before the prie-dieux, without looking in that direction, and Valjean turned back to him and watched curiously as he knelt at one and closed his eyes.

To meditate is to pray, perhaps, Valjean thought, and carefully knelt beside him at the other, closing his own eyes in imitation. He still had little idea of _how_ to pray. But he had tried, earlier, and the Bishop had come out to him somehow; he tried again, imagining the future and wishing himself there; consuming himself with the idea of honesty, which seemed at once unreachable and at hand.

Valjean did not know how long they knelt there - he had long practice in doing nothing, in waiting without thinking, but the effort of thought dazed him - only that it was not yet dawn when the Bishop rose from his prie-dieu with a rustle of nightclothes and creak of straw. The candle, set between them, had burned down somewhat, and Valjean, still distracted by his thoughts, blinked at it like an owl as the Bishop picked it up before climbing to his feet as well. 

"Madame Magloire will be up," the Bishop said once Valjean had risen. "We are early for Mass yet--" he smiled again, and while Valjean did not understand why, his eyes stayed kind, his words unmocking, "--so I will have her heat more water. We will wash and shave together."

It was said in a voice that brooked no argument; Valjean bobbed his head and again trailed after him into his bedroom. He had not looked at the room much before - save to mark the silver cabinet, which now repelled his gaze - and as the Bishop moved to set his candle atop a small table behind his bed, pushing aside the curtains surrounding it, he did so then. It was a large room, emptier than it ought to be: his eyes skimmed the bed, a desk, the fireplace; a shelf with more books than the Ignorantin school had held; some pictures on the wall of men he could not make out in the gloom, though the candlelight caught and shone on the crucifix above the chimney and he looked as well, transfixed briefly in a resurgence of the muddled thoughts he had fought through that night on his knees --

"Come," Monseigneur Bienvenu said, and Valjean startled back to himself, hurrying over to the table. A full ewer of water steamed in the cool autumn air; beside it a basin and soap, a cloth, a mirror, a brush, a razor and strop - all things he recognized, to be sure, but that he should touch them, that he should be offered them freely when they belonged to a bishop; when they might have belonged to that far-away man with the gold crown and the great purple cloak. He looked about almost wildly - Monseigneur Bienvenu still wore only a thin dressing gown over his nightshirt and there was a worn cassock laid out on the now-made bed, twin to the one Valjean remembered from before -- but there, there in the corner, atop the chair that stood before the writing-desk, a heavy wadded purple cloak--

Monseigneur Bienvenu's hand touched his shoulder again, gently, and Valjean started.

"Really, I should have offered you water when you first came here," the Bishop said, "as a guest coming into this house. But you seemed hungry and weary enough that I did not think it would refresh you. Use them now, if it will." With a gentle press of Valjean's shoulder he left, calling his housekeeper's name as he went.

Valjean turned back to the toilet table, shaking his head in silent confusion, and reached out to touch the ewer. It was as warm as it looked; a drop of water, caught on the lip, sparkled in the light. Carefully, he picked it up and poured water into the basin. Long ago, so very long ago, before Toulon, before his sister's husband had died - perhaps even before his father had died - Jeanne had had an ewer and basin like this, though not so fine; he remembered this, distantly, as a man might remember an old dream. The gentleness of warm, fresh water; the touch of a soft cloth in one's own hand instead of a rough scrubbing in sea water. He touched the cloth, the soap; the Bishop had told him to wash, he reminded himself, as he had told him to sit at the table and eat; he had given Valjean these things; he had told an impossible lie for him to the police. These things were real; they had somehow happened to Valjean himself, and he was bound to be good, to obey God, because of them. 

He took off his long, patched shirt and let it fall to the ground; he dipped the fine white soap in the water and lathered the flannel; he bent his head over the basin and began to wash. The water darkened quickly in the basin with the dust of the road; he scrubbed at his face, chest, and arms until the ewer was nearly emptied, then hung the cloth over the edge of the basin and glanced - half by accident - into the shaving mirror.

The face in the mirror was a stranger to him; rough but newly clean skin still reddened by the rub of cloth, wrinkles and lines carved deeply over the last twenty years, his short, ill-cropped hair and beard running wildly into each other with no distinction. Valjean had not seen many honest men to judge by, but that half-savage face in the mirror did not match the fuzzy picture that came to mind when he tried to imagine one.

The razor, when he gripped it, was strange in his hand - heavy and unfamiliar - and he raised it uncertainly, looking into the mirror. His week's growth of beard was already thick and ragged; the idea of shaving it was much like everything else that troubled him: there was no clear idea of where to begin, or how to go on once he had started. 

"Let me help you," the Bishop said, coming up behind him and setting a second ewer on the table, then pinching out the candle. The sun had begun to rise while Valjean had been washing and the thin gray light was enough to see by, though the shadows were still long.

"You have helped me," Valjean said, first watching as the Bishop lifted the basin from the table and carried it across the room, then scrambling to open the garden doors for him, "Monseigneur, you helped me. You fed me, you let me stay in your house, you gave me a bed, you gave me food, you gave me your silver. You told them you had given it to me, but I had stolen it. You are good - you are a bishop, you must be good. You must be honest." 

The Bishop poured out the water onto the plot of flowers that lay nearest the door. "That silver had belonged to you; you did not steal it," he said gravely, looking into Valjean's face. "Just as this is not my house, but the house of Christ, and everything within it belongs to those in need." 

Valjean gave way before him and again trailed him to the table. In the morning light, in the growing calmness of his soul, the words began almost to make sense. 

"You have come from a dark place," the Bishop continued when they stood side by side before it, setting the bowl down where it had stood and turning to face Valjean again. "There is no shame in needing a light to find your way out of perdition. Sit, and I will help you."

"But you are a bishop," Valjean said again, hardly glancing at the chair. He was certain of that by now, despite the lack of gold crown and distant grandeur; it seemed to him that the priest before him belonged to the future he had half-dreamed of; that he glittered brilliantly there in the sourceless light, and that the memory of the Bishop of Marseilles was falling into the gloomy darkness of the past.

Monseigneur Bienvenu was already reaching for soap and brush. "Christ was a shepherd of men; to shear one will cause me no hardship." 

Valjean, entirely lacking an argument for this, sat. The Bishop's fingers cupped his chin, tilting it with a tenderness he had not felt against his bare skin for long and empty years; the boar's bristles flicked over his cheeks, wielded by a gentle hand and leaving behind soft white foam - and when at last Monseigneur Bienvenu traded brush for blade, setting it lightly against his throat, Valjean looked up without fear, and found that Heaven was no longer so far away at dawn as it had been in the dark of night.


End file.
